The three-page document - reportedly an internal guide for instructing North Korea’s military brass on the state’s official views prior to the Hanoi summit - was published by the Workers’ Party of Korea in November 2018.
“The dear supreme commander will dominate the world with the nuclear weapons, and will make the US apologize and compensate us for decades of bullying our people, and will declare to the entire world that the world’s powerful order will be reshaped by the Juche-Korea, not the United States,” the document reads. Juche is the North Korean ideology of self-reliance.
Kim is reportedly quoted in the document saying that he will use the meeting “to further consolidate nuclear power that we have created.” According to UPI, other sections of the text note that North Korea has managed to reach its most advanced stage of “strategic rocket” development under Kim.
Morgan Ortagus, spokesperson for the US State Department, told the publication that despite the remarks made in the document, both Trump and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “believe that Chairman Kim will fulfill his commitment to denuclearize, and that remains our policy.”
The document’s authenticity is currently being reviewed by South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which stated Monday that they have been made aware of the text. Questionable features raising red flags include, but are not limited to, the format of the document’s date and indications of whether it was meant for distribution to the Workers’ Party or the “interior,” analyst Cheong Seong Chang told UPI.
Ri Jong Ho, a North Korean official who defected to South Korea in 2014, told VOA on Sunday that “the document directly reflects Kim’s thoughts and the ideology of the Korea Workers’ Party because it is published by the Party.” He also indicated that during his time in the DPRK, he’d attended training lectures in which similar texts were passed out to attendees.
Countries legally viewed as nuclear weapon states include China, France, Russia, the US and the UK, per the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty. India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea are seen as de-facto nuclear weapon states outside of the treaty.
Trump and Kim’s two-day summit in Hanoi came to an abrupt end in February 2019 after the US ultimately refused to offer North Korea any relief from economic sanctions that had been placed on the state. At a press briefing, Trump told reporters that “they wanted the sanctions lifted entirely,” but that the US simply “couldn’t do that.”
The latest development comes just as China’s earthquake monitoring agency indicated that a suspected explosion had triggered a magnitude 1.3 earthquake in the Chinese city of Hunchun, which borders North Korea. Reports of the blast subsequently sparked concern that the DPRK had conducted another nuclear test.